The present invention relates to electronic mail (e-mail). More particularly, the present invention relates to combining speech recognition with electronic mail.
Electronic mail is being used with every increasing frequency for people to communicate both for business and personal reasons. Typically, messages are conveyed to and from an e-mail recipient in a textual format wherein the sender composes a text message. If the recipient chooses to reply, he or she composes another text message in response.
With the increased use e-mails for communication, there has been a desire to extend access to situations where the user does not have the availability of a computer. In particular, applications have been developed to allow a user to access his or her e-mail through a phone. Using text-to-speech technology, these types of systems will read a selected e-mail message to the user.
Although reading e-mail messages over the phone provides increases accessibility for the user to his or her e-mail, in many cases the recipient may want to reply in some manner. However, general dictation over the phone and subsequent speech-to-text recognition over phone lines is not practical. In particular, the bandwidth available for phone lines, the quality of the phone and the environment that the user may be in makes it extremely difficult to detect the subtleties of general dictation over the phone. Nevertheless, there is still exists a need in many cases for a recipient to reply to an e-mail message over the phone.